On the night of October 10, 2015, at the Seawell Grand Ballroom at the Denver Center for Performing Arts, Judy and Dennis Shepard and the rest of the Matthew Shepard Foundation gathered at our Honors Gala with friends and supporters, new and old, to celebrate another year of progress toward our mission to secure a…
The Matthew Shepard Foundation is proud to announce its participation in the Anti Defamation League’s (ADL) #50StatesAgainstHate coalition aimed at implementing and strengthening hate crimes laws across the country. Our executive director, Jason Marsden, joined ADL’s Civil Rights Committee on October 16 in Denver to speak about the Foundation’s long held position as leaders in hate crimes…
On October 17, 18 and 25 in Long Beach, California, the First Congregational Church of Long Beach (FCC-LB) will present composer Curtis Heard’s musical accompaniment to Lesléa Newman’s critically acclaimed poetry collection October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard. Originally published in 2012, Newman’s poetry in October Mourning is an “exploration of the impact of…
By Sean McEntee, Communications Associate Dear Supporters and Readers, The month of October is somber for the Matthew Shepard Foundation. On the morning of Oct. 7, 1998, Matthew was found brutally beaten and tied to a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming, and would later succumb to his wounds. During this week in 1998, a family experienced…
Violence against the LGBTQ+ community didn’t begin or end with Matthew Shepard. In fact, in huge portions of America, properly identifying, reporting and prosecuting these heinous crimes hasn’t even begun — despite the 2009 passage of the Shepard-Byrd Act. Matthew’s story, and the Foundation’s work to Erase Hate, are—unfortunately—still critical in coming to terms with the roots of violence against our community.
On September 28, Judy and Dennis Shepard, along with Dave O’Malley, the lead investigator into Matthew’s murder in Laramie, Wyo. in 1998 and now sheriff of Albany County, Wyoming, joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) to urge better hate crimes reporting and to spotlight the distressing lack of basic information about this epidemic of violence.
The Matthew Shepard Foundation was privileged to have the opportunity for Judy and Dennis Shepard to discuss issues of bullying and hate crimes with students, administrators and government officials in Lexington, Kentucky on August 27. After the recent ruling for nationwide marriage equality by the Supreme Court this past June, the Foundation and others advocating for…
The Matthew Shepard Foundation is proud to be one of 25 advocacy organizations to sign a national letter to the Common Application requesting the addition of optional demographic questions related to gender identity and sexual orientation to its standard form. As more and more LGBT youth are living openly as who they are at younger…
The SANE-SART Resource Service, based in Minneapolis, Minn., is setting out to create a culture in which victims of sexual assault can “break the silence” and are unafraid to report rape, confident of receiving caring treatment and encouraged to seek justice. In our culture’s current state, more than half of sexual assault victims do not…
